


Wine on the snow

by SharpestRose



Category: Hetty Wainthropp Investigates
Genre: AU, Bow - Freeform, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-01
Updated: 2011-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 22:08:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You shouldn't go out o' nights, Mike," Geoffrey will say in a stern and concerned tone. "There's something wicked on the streets. Stay here with our Janet until things get safer."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wine on the snow

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [bow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/454) by [Hope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hope/pseuds/Hope). 



The frayed ends of a the nightmare she's only just woken from are like cobwebs in her head, sticky and claustrophobic and deceptively insubstantial. She pushes the queasy sensation that the memory gives her to one side and pulls her thick stockings up her skinny legs.

"Mikey. Come on, up with it."

Janet's voice is, as always, as kindly as she can make it without getting a resentful glare from her brother. There are four years between them but it would be her head on the block if she ever dared call him younger. Or smaller, though that's as true. Mikey has been small since he lived through a bad case of pneumonia the year after their parents died, when Janet was twelve and the boy himself eight. Sometimes, if they're in particularly jubilant moods, Janet will make a joke about that horrifying winter. It's her way of cursing God, spitting in the face of a fate that tried to take her Mikey from her.

"It's good that Bollingsworth only paid me skivvy wages, feeding a glutton like you kept the puppy fat from sticking to my hips."

When Janet says that Mikey always smiles and plants a kiss on her cheek. He has soft lips, though Janet's painfully aware she's got nothing to compare them to.

They told the man that hired them here at the hotel that they were newlyweds, it was the only way for a boy and a girl of their age (seventeen and twenty-one, and that feels like a dozen centuries on their bones) to have a room to share. And Janet doesn't know what she'd do without being able to reach over and feel Mikey's heart beating under her hand in the night. But there's no way their story was believed, not when they share the wide blue eyes of their irish-blooded mother (selkie, Dad used to call her. He said, too, that they were his little selkie children, but if those jokes had been true then Mum wouldn't have had anything to fear from the damp in their garret, nor Mikey. Selkies did not have to worry about water clogging their lungs up). But if Mr. Kerner thinks them inbred slum trash then perhaps they'll be spared the oily looks he gives the other maids and porters, so in the end it's all for the best that they look more like twins than anything else.

Living up under the rafters of the hotel is lovely, too lovely when it's time to rise in the morning. Janet sighs and nudges the lump still wrapped in blankets with one buckle-shoed foot.

"You'll miss breakfast if you don't move it, you know. Tie my apron for me, will you? My hands are all thumbs and I can't get the strings right. Oh, Mikey, get up, we don't have time for this."

Mikey's eyes open sluggishly, red-rimmed (or is it just that his skin is as pale as the blue watered milk that they used to beg from these very kitchens years ago?) and glassy by the puddle of smoky dawn light coming through the window.

"Give me a minute, Jan, just a minute."

"You shouldn't be getting up at all." _But you have to_ , the phrase ends silently and they both know it.

Mikey, though younger, is in many ways the leader of the two. When he tells Janet something, she'll nod and follow, but if Mikey doesn't want to take a step then Janet could plead with him for a thousand years and he wouldn't move an inch.

When a sixteen-year-old Janet watched the gorgeous debutantes in their silk dresses (cut on the bias, such an extravagance but it made the curves fall like rich wine spilt on the snow against their smooth pale stockings), Mikey told her to wait as quiet as a church mouse and went out for the darkest, coldest hours of the night, and Janet tried not to cry but she missed the comforting thuda-thuda of his pulse against her ear as she slept against him. Then Mikey came back with a dress for her (wine on the snow against her smooth freezing legs) and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed at his hands.

He's never said what happened in those lost hours, but it seems to Janet that some small part of him died. He killed some fraction of himself to give her the stupid fancy clothing she wished for. Had he slipped a small dagger, glinting silver under the gaslight, between the corset-molded ribs of a girl not so different from his snotty, filthy sister waiting at home? Mikey had never been afraid of death. It would not have made him react as he did, perhaps.

There were other ways for boys of twelve (especially ones with selkie-blue eyes and soft lips) to make a few coins, enough to buy a dress like that. But Janet couldn't think about that, not her dear boy who she'd promised Dad she would keep an eye on. If Mikey had left it behind, then so would she.

"If you're late, you might miss Geoffrey." Janet's voice is arch but her smile genuine as Mikey's face lights up with excitement. Geoffrey Swanson is a young copper, probably no older than Janet and perhaps closer to Mikey in age, and though the details of their first meeting are lost to history the two lads are now firm friends. They make a funny pair, both are prone to guiless smiles and strangely naive conversation. Geoffrey has made it a habit over time to stop by and see his friend early in the day, as Mikey begins his work and Geoffrey heads home at the end of his.

Janet's glad of the friendship, because Mikey deserves to have people who care about him. If Janet's learnt to play the role of surrogate mother over time, then Geoffrey is the closest Mikey has to a father. "You shouldn't go out o' nights, Mike," Geoffrey will say in a stern and concerned tone. "There's something wicked on the streets. Stay here with our Janet until things get safer."

"Things are never safer, Geoff," Mikey answers.

Janet can't help but feel a little thrill in her belly when Geoffrey says 'our Janet'. She'd be a good copper's wife, as far as she can see, for she's got a good head on her shoulders and isn't fond of nonsense. They could have a little house and Mikey would live there as well, of course, and perhaps he'd stop the habit of washing his hands red-raw before getting into bed. Someday, maybe, Geoffrey will begin to see her as more than Mikey's sister.

Eventually Janet manages to rouse Mikey and the day begins in earnest. When she's fixing up the coal in the upstairs rooms (so many stairs to carry the heavy weight up, it's a wonder her arms don't turn blue from the strain) and scrubbing out pots and folding the fine cotton sheets and pillowcases into pin-straight edges it's easy to forget the nightmares of the night before.

To roll over and find Mikey's skin waxy and cool, blood stilled in his veins and air trapped behind his soft lips, gone bruise-dark in death. To be alone, utterly, forever. Would sunrise come at all, if Mikey went from her in the night?

Whenever Janet has such a dream, she fumbles sleepily to clutch at her brother and feel for his pulse. There's always a sickening split-second of nothing before the lively flutter under his skin releases her from the nightmare. Another second and his skinny chest rises and falls with a breath, and Janet's own breath comes out in a long sigh and she can sleep again. Nothing truly bad can happen, Janet has learnt, so long as Mikey's heart is beating.


End file.
